Massafra

Massafra - Massafra is a town of 31,837 inhabitants in the province of Tranto in Puglia. Located at the foot of the Taranto Murgia, the city is part of the Terra delle Gravine Regional Natural Park and hosts the WWF oasis of Mount Sant'Elia. There are numerous monuments lost in time to visit. The Sanctuary of the Madonna della Scala is accessible via a stairway of 125 steps that popular tradition recommends counting as the number going up will be different from the number going down.

The icon of the Madonna della Scala is placed on the main altar. On the walls there are six other altars, three on each side where the painting of the Miracle of the Hinds and sixteen seventeenth-century canvases depicting the Apostles and Evangelists are kept. The devotion to the Madonna della Scala originates from the miracle of the hinds, according to legend some shepherds saw deer stop by a tuffaceous mass on which the representation of the virgin was preserved, the event was considered miraculous and from there I began a pilgrimage and then the construction of the sanctuary. In the center of the city is the church of San Leonardo; an 11th century rock church in the Orthodox style. In the sacred part there is the image of Christ with the Madonna and San Giovanni, in the other walls there are other well-preserved paintings of the saints Medici Cosma and San Damiano. The church is articulated by six pillars with capitals and colonnades and a cross in the center. The Church of the Infant Jesus, consisting of a single nave with four side chapels. The neoclassical facade houses the miraculous statuette on which a golden crown is placed. The strong point of the city is the Castle of Massafra whose news dates back to 970. With the Angevin dominion, the castle took on the appearance of a fortress with bastion and towers. With the Aragonese it underwent transformations such as the construction of the octagonal tower and the facade facing the ravine. The castle passed through several owners before reaching the municipality. The rooms of the stables, barns, armory, prisons, warehouses and the chapel dedicated to San Lorenzo are kept inside. Characteristic constructions of the city center are the 'Vicinanze' that is the underground dwellings that the inhabitants of Massafra built after having depopulated the ravines. They are called this because they are houses carved into the rock all close to each other and arranged around a central square. These houses had a constant temperature of 16 °, they were very small and they lived in two rooms together with the animals. Today they are used as garages and warehouses, but once they were safe houses with tunnels that guaranteed the escape route to the sea. The 'Vicinanza' of Vico Torelli is the largest, with 10 rooms with 20m underground and was used as a quarry to extract the limestone used for the construction of the buildings in the historic center. Pyramid-shaped, it has a deeper part used to collect snow for water in periods of drought. The city has an artistic heritage to visit to get excited and discover the Italy of the past.